


Extraordinary Circumstance

by doctorsaxon



Category: Homestuck
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-10-03
Updated: 2012-10-03
Packaged: 2017-11-15 14:24:01
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,786
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/528251
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/doctorsaxon/pseuds/doctorsaxon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Dave Strider finds Sollux Captor, a 'vagabond', and invites him into his house, he isn't entirely sure of what he's getting himself into.  As a relationship grows and Sollux's issues come to light, will Dave be able to handle it?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Extraordinary Circumstance

**Author's Note:**

> Hello all! The idea for this fic has been banging around in my head for some time, and I finally wrote the first chapter down. Let me know what you think, and enjoy.

Dave Strider’s alarm blared obnoxiously from his bedside; its tone was crude and harsh, signaling that it was officially six o’ clock in the morning, and time to start the day. From where the boy sat buried in his pillow, however, it was time to go the fuck back to sleep. It had been another long night up on his computer, mixing tracks that he hoped people would listen to religiously (they didn’t) and hoping he’d be the next big thing in music one day (he wouldn’t). And when he finally got to sleep at around four in the morning, he knew that the morning would not be a welcome visitor.

And what do you know, it really wasn’t.

He let it continue on for a couple agonizing minutes, wrestling with the desire to turn it off versus the desire to just lie there in self-pity at his current predicament. He settle for the former with a sigh, sitting up and rubbing his eyes. Bright, cursed things they were. His brother often commented on how they elevated him beyond cool kid status, but he couldn’t be bothered to believe him most days. He kept them covered, even around the house, with his shades. Round and large and so different from Dirk’s pointed, sharply angled ones. Different from his brother was good. He idolized him but wanted to make his own reputation as totally cool.

He slid the shades on, finger-combing the unruly mess that was his morning bedhead. As usual, it was a fruitless effort, resulting in fingers snagged in tangles and hair that barely resembled an organized rat’s nest. He had to shower, anyway, didn’t know why he was bothering when it’d take nearly an hour to get his hair just so. He hauled himself out of bed, bare feet hitting the carpet and kicking aside a pair of shorts in disinterest as he stood. An idle glance around the room and… yeah, it was just as much a mess as always. Maybe he should clea- ha ha, that’s a funny thought Dave. He knew where everything was, that was the important bit.

He shuffled his way into the bathroom, glancing at his reflection in the mirror. One couldn’t see the bags under his eyes from lack of sleep, but the dark glasses on his face accentuated how pale he was from said depravation. He shucked his boxers and, after a moment, his shades before throwing the shower on nearly as hot as it would go. Hot showers, thank God for modern plumbing. Dave didn’t drink coffee (unless it had more sugar than coffee in it), so hot showers in the morning were his starter. He stepped in and let out a grateful sigh, forehead bracing against the rapidly warming tiled wall. Steam rose up around him, perhaps doing more good than the water itself at rousing Dave from his morning stupor. He simply stood like that for a while, enjoying the water as it ran down his back, before he even started making steps towards cleanliness. A quick squirt of shampoo (the same as Dirk’s) and his hair worked up a nice lather, rich white froth building up between Dave’s fingers as he scrubbed habitually. Also habitually, he couldn’t help but slick up a nice mohawk with the structure of the foam. Cool. As soon as his new hairstyle appeared, however, it was gone again under a torrent of water. He prized clean, silky locks over a shampoo style any day. Call him old-fashioned like that.

Conditioner, body wash, and maybe a bit of personal grooming (no Dirk, not manscaping, totally different things bro) and he was done. Almost. Just a few more minutes of enjoying the hot water, and he may be brave enough to face the day, and face school.

His head hit the wall again with a gentle thunk.

 

The first three periods were uneventful as ever. Math, health, and US history were arguably the dullest classes ever spawned in the mind of sadists. At least things could only look up after lunch – science, music, and English in that order. Slightly more tolerable, at least. And he got lunch now, which meant getting to see the one person who probably made the whole day a little less than shit.

“Hey, Dave!”

Speak of the devil indeed. The blonde looked up from his lunch, a half-passable French bread pizza, coleslaw that was briefly introduced to flavor, and a strange concoction that called itself raspberry applesauce and vaguely resembled something Dave had a nightmare about once in third grade.

“Well well, look who decided to show up,” he drawled, watching his friend draw closer. John Egbert, class A dweeb and best friend. He had other friends, of course, but John was the one who stood out the most. Yeah, he was pretty dorky and liked really dumb shit. Yeah, his movie taste was worse than Dirk’s taste in collectables, and yeah sometimes he wanted to punch the kid in the face, but John was still probably the best friend Dave could ask for. He was reliable and fun to argue with and he couldn’t even hate the kid when he pulled his stupid pranks at Dave’s expense. He was infuriatingly likable and put up with Dave despite him being as much of a dick as John was a dork.

And wasn’t that what high school friendships were about?

“Sorry! Vriska was out of lunch money again, so I had to spot her some.”

“What’s that, the third time this week?”

“I know, but she said she’ll pay me back!”

“Uh huh…” Dave rolled his eyes, poking and prodding at the mass of coleslaw which he could swear growled at him at the unwanted attention. How he longed for the mythical days his brother told him of, when school food was not only edible but good. Homemade even. Shit like macaroni and cheese and ribs and real food, not this… ghost of what used to be. He took another bite of his pizza, a faint frown etched onto his features.

The only class the two shared was science, a fact they both despised. As much as their dad and brother respectively told them it was a good thing, keep them from dicking around in too many classes, they wished they had the chance to at least share math. John was always better at making numbers fall into place than Dave was, just like Dave tended to be better in English than his friend. It wasn’t anything against the kid – just not his forte. Dave was all up in that forte. He took that forte out to fucking dinner, romanced it up with some nice wine and shit, then fucked that forte right into early morning. Maybe he’d drive that forte to work and give it a kiss on the cheek before skipping town to find some other forte.

At least they could trade homework.

“What’ve you got for Ms. T’s?” Dave asked, thumbing through his math folder to hand his assigned homework over to John.

“Uhh, just gotta read something tonight. What have you got for Mr. Jones’?”

“Fucking trig.” Dave slid the small packet of papers across the table for John to look over, nod at, and put in his own math folder. Honestly his friend could be a saint.

“Thanks man, I owe you when you get something worthwhile from Ms. T,” he said, giving another bite to his pizza. Shit wasn’t bad, necessarily. Just wasn’t good.

“It’s no problem! It’s not a lot of homework, so it doesn’t take long,” he returned, starting to explain about how he didn’t really mind doing extra homework as long as it wasn’t an entire other bundle of it, because it really took a minimal amount of extra time. Dave sort of zoned out at this point, watching other kids puttering around with only mild interest. He saw Rose and Kanaya off to the side of the lunch room. His half-sister was leaning in close, smiling, her eyes bright, and the other girl seemed just as keen. Aw cute, take a fucking picture. On the other side of the room he saw Feferi and her circle of friends, and she seemed to be talking excitedly about something or other (no surprise there) while stabbing into her home-packed fish fillet mercilessly (also no surprise). A few more faces he knew lay scattered around the lunchroom, some he couldn’t put names to and some he didn’t care to. Tavros and Gamzee he recognized, sitting together at a far corner and sharing a lunch that Gamzee seemed to be eating most of, mostly through his attempts at feeding Tavros and giving up and eating himself instead.

By the time lunch was over, Dave had only eaten some of the more edible parts of his lunch and done enough people watching to tide him over until the end of school. He loitered a bit to wait for John after tossing his tray, and the two made their way to their lockers and then science together, chatting idly on the way.

 

Science, music, English.

Another day, another useless eight hours spent attempting to cram pointless knowledge into a brain much better suited for sarcasm and sick beats. Dave gathered his things, exchanged a little wave with John, who was catching the bus, and started the walk home. Dave used to take the bus too, before deciding that for his own sanity it was better to walk home. And hey, it helped him stay in shape or some shit so it couldn’t be that bad.

He’d rather be alone than in a hot metal tube with the assholes he had just been forced to spend eight hours with, anyway.

His route home from school lead him through the center of town, a gentle buzz rather than the roar he spent his childhood in. It was a nice place, all in all, way different from Houston, but nice. People were friendly and kind, flags hung up outside storefronts and barbers had those neat little candy cane looking pole things that spun around. It was idyllic, obnoxiously so, but Dave grew to enjoy the scenery. It was also a bit better smelling than Houston, fresh bread trumped pollution any day.

But in all the days that Dave passed through this little community, today was the day that he seemed to be the only witness to a crime.

In an alleyway near the outer rim of town, pass the quaint little shops and towards one of the ghettos, he could hear muffled scuffing and soft groans of pain. Call him the noble sort, but he found himself peering down the alleyway to see the commotion. And laying on his side, curled up into a tight ball with his arms protectively in front of his face, was a bum. Three men stood over him, relatively well-off by their dress and he recognized one from school, in fact. Some kid who was in Feferi’s clique. The three looked up when Dave made himself more visible, one reaching for his pocket before the kid he recognized – Erisomething – stopped him. They seemed to make some silent agreement before shouldering past Dave, jostling him a bit on their way past and leaving the blonde alone with the huddled up, listless bum.

He could have turned and walked away, could have just walked away and worried later about whether he was in time to save this guy’s life. He could have a clear conscience knowing that he did what he could, if he found out later the guy was dead. But instead he walked over, and knelt down, and touched him.

The other reacted with a cringe, followed by a soft sound of confusion when the touch was gentle and not unforgiving. He peered cautiously out from between his raised arms, before slowly lowering them. The kid, because it was obvious now that he was a kid, was around Dave’s age. He was a mess of tousled black hair and grungy skin, a scarf and old coat and tattered clothes, complete with gloves with worn off fingers and mismatched shoes coming apart at the sole. He was too damn young to be on the streets, too damn thin to be alive, and too damn hesitant to meet his eyes. His own were apparently heterochromatic, one blue and one brown (at least, it was mostly brown, but it seemed there was a sliver untouched by the heterochromia that still had a true, crystalline blue to it. Dave found himself staring an embarrassing amount of time before he found his voice.

“Hey, you alright?” he asked, tilting his head to try to get better eye contact with the other. The kid just nodded, wincing as he tried to sit up. Well that was obviously a lie. “Hey, take it easy… they kinda kicked the shit out of you, I don’t think anyone’d fault you for taking it slow with standing up.”

Dave watched, a bit of concern working its way into his features, as the other patted himself down. He twitched and winced when his hands touched certain parts of himself – his ribs, his shoulder, his head, his leg, other various spots primarily clustered around his midsection, and his chest.

“I’m fine, just a bit bruised,” he mumbled, a slight hiss accompanying the s sounds that worked into his words.

“Come on, man, let me help you up,” Dave insisted, offering the other a hand. After a long moment’s hesitation, the bum seemed to decide he had nothing else to lose and took it, pulling himself up onto unsteady feet.

They stood there for a while, one making sure the other didn’t fall as he shook on uncertain feet. And then Dave felt he needed to introduce himself somehow, and cleared his throat.

“Uh, the name’s Dave… you sure you’re alright? You’re pretty shaken.”

The other wet his lips before responding.

“Sollux. I’m… I’ve been worse. I’m shaken, yeah, just… shaken and a little bruised. May have a broken rib… I’m fine though. Probably.”

Dave frowned.

“No, dude, you’re seriously not fine. Come on, you can come chill with me for tonight, at least. My bro won’t care, he’s cool. You can get a shower and all that junk, too.”

The recently dubbed Sollux hesitated a moment, eying Dave with some skepticism.

“You’re just inviting me over, just like that? You don’t think I’m going to murder you or rob you or anything?”

“Nah. I figure if you wanted to you’d do it by now, and if you try my bro has a sword and can kick ass with it so you’d be the one losing there.”

That seemed to wring a dry chuckle from the other’s throat, and he nodded.

“I’m still not convinced you don’t want to kill me,” he continued, running his fingers through messy hair, “but I’ll take my chances if it means a shower.”

 

“Bro, I’m home! I, uh, brought someone with.”

Dirk peeked from the kitchen, squinting at the pair with a bit of suspicion. Some stranger followed his brother home from school? While it wouldn’t be the first time, the last one was obviously someone he met in school. This one, not so much. And yet from the way this kid shuffled on his feet, looked around in awe at the sheer presence of a house, and seemed to lean towards the door expectantly, he found himself shrugging and disappearing back into the kitchen.

“Heads up would’ve been nice,” he scolded lightly, “now I need to make more dinner.”

“Dinner?” Sollux said, voice taking an edge of disbelief.

“Yeah, dinner. Y’know, after lunch, before dessert, usually involves food.”

“Yeah, I know what dinner is, I just… you don’t need to feed me.”

“Yeah, we sorta do. Have you seen your ribs? Cause I have.”

The other stared at him for a moment, as if processing that statement, before giving a slight shrug and starting towards the stairs.

“I’m going to take you up on that shower,” he called over his shoulder, taking the steps two at a time. “I can find the bathroom.” Dave was a bit skeptical of that fact, but sure enough he heard the water switch on some time later.

A shower, an inhaled dinner, and Sollux found himself on the couch. Dave was almost disappointed he didn’t get to talk to this kid some more, but from the way he slept he sort of figured talking could wait. He laid a blanket over his too-frail body and switched off the light before heading up to bed himself.

One way or another, tomorrow would be an interesting one to wake up to.


End file.
